Today’s oil painting class was at a Audubon Coastal Reserve. The assignment–no brushes! This time we were asked to paint using only thin pieces of cardboard and/or a palette knife. It was frustrating at times but once I got into the groove of it, it felt more like icing a cake with a thick gooey delicious frosting [and I looooove frosting.]

It was interesting to let go of detail and cover large areas of the canvas at a time, letting the colors meld which each other and form loose textures. This became about the paint itself and less about the subject matter.

The paint was so thick that looking closely at the painting felt like looking at an abstraction. When you step back, the painting takes it’s shape and the tones come together to form the image.

Here is a detail of the thick paint which will probably take a few weeks to dry completely:

I just got an email on Monday morning that made my entire week.

A very nice woman named Christine told me she loved my children’s book Dogi the Yogi and asked me for suggestions on publishing her own book of poems.

When we spoke on the phone she told me that while on a yoga retreat in South Africa she donated several copies of Dogi the Yogi to the library of an underprivileged school called The Christel House .

Knowing that my book is being shared this way  makes my heart sing.

When I put art out in the world, I never know for sure if anyone is getting the message.

Hearing a story like this affirms that I’m on the right path.

Thank you Christine!

I  thought I was going to have to move to Tahiti to use the same types of colors that Gaugin was using or  camp out in Provence to replicate Matisse’s palette.

Instead, my amazing painting teacher, Dean Fisher, was giving a color demo and mentioned that one artist he knew took earth tones entirely out of his palette.

Somehow this concept was completely foreign to me, which is strange because when I paint with acrylics or gouache, there is almost never an earth tone in sight.

I was trained in traditional plein air painting in Provence with a very earthy palette including raw umber, burnt sienna and yellow ochre. While these colors have worked well for me in the past, they were no longer resonating with my need for vibrant color. I was feeling like everything was becoming very brown and blue.

Without earth tones I was forced to rely on creating my own browns which became a mixture of ultramarine and alizarin crimson with the teeniest dab of cadmium yellow or veridian. Shadows were violet, sun spots were pale yellow and pinks at long last crept onto my canvas.

Now that I have a new ‘vocabulary’ of color, I can’t wait to get onto the next painting to see what happens next.